Teaching Experience

1969–70 (two full years): U.S. Peace Corps, Miri, Sarawak, East
Malaysia. Teaching History, Economics, Mathematics, and English, first form (equivalent
to U.S. junior high) to upper sixth form (equivalent to U.S. junior college).

History 3300: Modern China
History 3330: Modern Japan
History 3900: Modern Military History
History 4360/6360: The Vietnam Wars

Other courses taught:

History 101: U.S. History up to 1876
History 172, 173: Western Civilization
History 191: The Twentieth Century World
History 193: Modern World History
History 198: Historical Background of Current Events
History 492/692: China's International Relations
History 492/692: The Persian Gulf War
History 4920/6920: The US-Iraq Wars
History 494/694: History of Warfare
History 880: Modern China
History 880: The Persian Gulf War
History 880: Media Coverage of Recent American Wars

"JFK and the Myth of Withdrawal,"
in Marilyn B. Young and Robert Buzzanco, eds., A Companion to the
Vietnam War (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), pp. 162–173.

"The Mirage of Negotiations," in Lloyd Gardner and Ted Gittinger, eds.,
The Search for Peace in Vietnam, 1964–1968 (Texas A&M University Press, 2004), pp. 73–82.

"The Myths of the Tet Offensive," in Michael Aung-Thwin and Kenneth R. Hall, eds.,
New Perspectives on the History and Historiography of Southeast Asia: Continuing Explorations (London and New York: Routledge,
2011), pp. 229–254.

"Tonkin Gulf in Historical Perspective," Passport (the newsletter of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations),
45:2 (September 2014), pp. 46–50.

Electronic publications:

Vietnam War Bibliography. This bibliography, of more than 5,000 items organized
in more than 100 sections, has good
coverage of books relating to the war, and less comprehensive coverage of articles and documents. It has
recently begun to have links to the actual texts of a significant number of items,
as more works and documents relating to the war have begun to be placed on the Internet.

"Nationalism and Communism in Vietnam", presented to the
Association for Third World Studies, Americus, GA, April 15, 1988.

"Press Coverage of the Tonkin Gulf Incidents: August 1964",
Popular Culture Association, St. Louis, MO, April 7, 1989.

"Limited War", Association for Asian Studies, Chicago, April 7,
1990.

"Guerrilla Warfare", Association of Third World Studies,
Columbia, SC, October 12, 1990.

"Escalation Planning in 1964", Seminar on the History of the
Vietnam/Indochina War, Columbia University, November 16, 1990.

"Herman Kahn's Model and the Escalation of the Vietnam War",
Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, Washington, DC,
June 22, 1991.

"The Domino Theory",
Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, University of
Maryland, June 19, 1998.

"Land Reform in North Vietnam, 1953–1956", at the
18th Annual Conference on Southeast Asian Studies,
"Mass Political Violence in 20th Century Southeast Asia",
Center for Southeast Asia Studies,
University of California, Berkeley, February 16, 2001.

"The Mirage of Negotiations", at the conference "The Vietnam
War: The Search for Peace in the Johnson Years", LBJ Presidential
Library, April 22, 2001.

Participant in the panel "Teaching the Tet Offensive and 1968: A Roundtable Discussion" at the
Sixth Triennial Vietnam Symposium, The Vietnam Center, Texas Tech University, March 14, 2008.

"The Myths of the Tet Offensive." Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Military History,
Murfreesboro, Tennessee, April 3, 2009.

"Chinese Public Policy in Historical Perspective". Paper presented at the International Convention of Asia Scholars, Macau, China, June 24, 2013.

"Chinese Public Policy: State-Society Relations in Historical Perspective". Paper (a slightly modified version of the previous item)
presented at a conference "State-Society Relations in the New Era: Lessons from and for China," Fudan University, Shanghai, China, June 30, 2013.

"Reading Enemy Communications and Still Not Knowing: Tonkin Gulf 1964." Paper presented at the Symposium on Cryptologic History
(hosted by the National Security Agency's Center for Cryptologic History), Laurel, MD, October 20, 2017.

Awards

Future Projects

I am in the early stages of writing a study of asymmetric warfare, and the ways the status of the United States as an asymmetric power has
affected American wars since World War II.

I have completed the manuscript of a revised edition of my book on the Tonkin Gulf Incidents, and I hope to get it published
in the reasonably near future.

I hope eventually to publish a study of the role of optimism in recent American wars, from Vietnam through Iraq. I will be comparing the case
of Vietnam 1967–68 with other cases before and after that.

I have for more than thirty years been writing an overall history of the Vietnam War, tentatively
titled Means and Ends: The Logic of Vietnam.
I have a draft of about 100,000 words, but completion is still years
away. My book on Tonkin Gulf was a section of this that grew to
become a separate book. The section on the Tet Offensive has now done the same, and other sections may also do so
before I complete and publish the overall history.